Friday, April 16, 2010

file this under

'You Know You Knit Too Much When'....You know you knit too much when, in the course of watching a primetime crime drama show you observe that someone on said show has been killed on an airplane with a knitting needle (through the throat, no less), necessitating the solving of that crime...and maybe they show the victim from a long angle and you say out loud, to no one in particular, "Hmmmm...that looks like about a 4 1/2 mm, maybe Susan Bates"....and then they show a close up of the wound....and you discover you are right....uh thank you verra much...and then maybe your husband looks at you and says "you really need to step away from the needles"...yeah, like that'll happen...you will be pleased to know it wasn't the knitter that committed the crime...us knitters can be so wily and crafty...I just worried that maybe they will ban knitting needles from air travel...and I wouldn't want anyone eyeballing me whilst I was getting my knit on during a flight...


Thanks for all your well wishes on my health, you guys have no idea how much that means to me!  Things are coming along fine with physio, in fact I have my last in-home visit in about two weeks...after that I may need more therapy, but it's still up in the air.  I have flashes of normalcy more and more often...and by that I mean I'll be going along and realize I've done something I haven't been able to do since I got ill--like stand on my right leg and lift my left foot off the ground, for instance--and then I will do the fake dance of joy and lift my left foot about a million times just because I can...and then later on in the evening I'll be in enormous amounts of pain in my right leg because--duh--I put so much weight on it...it appears I won't learn...ah well, maybe the resolution of this condition won't take much longer...she said with hope...

I've been knitting...still finding it hard to stay monogamous to one project, so I'm just rolling with it...yes I have a lot of stuff on the needles, but it's all getting finished, so no big whoop.


First up is the Ishbel shawl/scarf.  I love looking at the "people" tab on Ravelry, and found that I was clicking on shawl projects more and more thinking 'wow that looks gorgeous'...after about 7 or 8 clicks, I realized it was the same pattern I was clicking on over and over...the Ishbel shawl, by Ysolda Teague, which appears to be very popular on Ravelry...I decided that since I was so drawn to it, I must have the pattern...now lace and I have a love/hate relationship...I always try lacy things and always end up screwing the pattern up and having to frog...and then hating them...but still the siren call of the pattern...so with wide-eyed optimism I cast on...and discovered that I'm really not that bad at lacy patterns after all....sure there was some tinking, and after one particular row I spread out the shawl to see how wide it was and didn't notice the 30 or so stitches falling off the one side of my circular (man was the air blue that night!) and had to rip back 2 or 3 rows because the stitches just unravelled so quickly...but still...I got it done!!  And now, I need to block, but here it is, in all its naked finished pre-blocked glory...

I made the small size, so it's more of a scarf than a shawl, and I have a feeling that the yarn is a little busy for the pattern, but still....lurv...I already have the yarn picked out for another...


The above picture is a better representation of the colourway...this is Yarn Pirate in Neptune, and when I went looking through the stash to find yarn to knit Ishbel, this literally fell out and hit me on the head, so I decided I'd better use it and not tempt fate.

I also found another dishcloth pattern to love...love to knit, love to finish, just plain love;


This is the Round Lacy Cloth by Rhonda White...it's a free pattern online and it really should be illegal to love a pattern this much, but if loving it is wrong I don't want to be right....it's ingenious...knits up wickedly fast and is so pretty when it's done it's almost a shame to use it on your dishes...well, maybe I wouldn't go that far...


Again, I already have another on my needles as I type this...it looks awesome in the variegated colours.

I also have a guilty pleasure to tell you about....sigh, here goes....my name is Kiki, and I like making doll clothes...



There, it's out...don't judge me....can I hear some of you singing "Creepy Doll" by Jonathan Coulton???  I can't help it, friends...I think they are too adorable...these are little 5-inch Berengeur babies, and their little duds are made out of crochet cotton size 10 thread and my teeny steely crochet hooks....




Cee is looking decidedly worried these days...keeps saying things like; "You're not going to turn into one of  THOSE women, are you??"...you know, the kind that fill their houses with weird porcelain dolls or those 'reborn' thingies?  I can't say as I am...but you just never know how deep this rabbit hole will go, folks.  Cee is seriously creeped out by them....he thinks they will come to life and try to steal his eyes while he sleeps....





I personally think they are far too adorable to ever be that mean, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion...

If you would like to knit Ishbel, you can find the pattern over at Ravelry here  you do need to purchase it, I think it's 3 British Pounds...

The Knitted Lacy Round Cloth by Rhonda White is free, and you can find it here

If you would like to join the dark side and make the tiny baby clothes, I found them in a booklet called "Itty Bitty Babies"....

"...and there's a creepy doll....that always follows you...it has a ruined eye, that is always open..."